I graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s degree in Communications with a Broadcast Journalism emphasis. I spent the next 11 years working in television news, the majority of the time as a reporter and several years as an associate producer in the states of Utah and Washington. During that time, I reported more 3,000 on-air stories on-air, most of which I shot and edited myself, while also solely running a live truck or portable live video streaming pack. The highlight of my career was getting selected for a media flight with the Air Force Thunderbirds.

I left the broadcast industry in 2014 to pursue a master’s degree in Communications at my alma mater. The School of Communications at BYU asked and entrusted me to do something that had never been done before at the college, and that was to work as full-time visiting News Media faculty while studying to earn a master’s degree. There, and more recently, I used my vast broadcast experience to teach numerous Journalism classes as well as photo, video, and audio production.

My final six months of employment at BYU, I served as the interim news director of the live daily news show. I mentored students along the way, some of whom won Hearst journalism awards and one former student who has received an Emmy.

(At the end of each semester, I edited a video montage of my broadcast students to showcase their hard work.)

I am currently enrolled as a doctoral candidate at Texas Tech University where I have completed my required coursework and will spend the next two semesters working on completing my dissertation in the area of immersive journalism and the impact of 360-video storytelling on visual attention and cognition. My research interests include how individuals process TV news and also the study of social media, including the role media convergence is playing in the future of broadcast television news. I recently received a Top Debut Paper award from Broadcast Education Association.